Hi, I'm Briana Johnson! I'm a marketing manager at LinearB, a fast-growing startup that helps engineering leaders optimize the workflow of their development teams. And I've learned to love detailed documentation as much as a software developer, thanks to Tango! 

SEO is the number one source of qualified leads and revenue at LinearB, which is a blessing and a curse. When I started a year ago, we had very little. I assembled a wonderful team, and together we’ve grown traffic, qualified leads, and SEO-sourced revenue by more than 300%. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished, and I also feel the pressure to continue raising the bar. 

I've been working in SEO since 2015, and I've always used freelancers. You can’t scale organic search at a start-up without them. Even when I had full-time internal writers and editors, I’ve supplemented with freelancers to move faster and accomplish more. 

We have a goal to publish expert-level content for 1,000 high-intent keywords across 25 different topics over the next 12 months. It can take one to two days to write a well-researched SEO blog post on technical topics like software development. So, at best, it would take one person four years to write 1,000 blogs. To hit this ambitious goal, we’ve assembled a team of three full-time internal content marketers, six permanent freelancers, and dozens of contract writers. 

Our SEO process is complicated 🤔

When I started at LinearB, I remember telling my boss we had a simple, eight-step SEO process. 🤣🤦 In reality, creating and distributing a single piece of content requires at least six people working together to complete a 309-step process across eight different tools. 

Our SEO tech stack includes:  

• SEMRush for keyword research, technical SEO, and rank tracking
• PandaCopy for writing, editing, and collaborating on blogs 
• Tango for process documentation and training guides
• Upwork for finding writers and editors 
• Excel for advanced keyword scoring
• RankMath for content scoring 
• Wordpress for hosting 
• Figma for graphics 

Here’s a breakdown of our 309-step end-to-end process: 

• Keyword research is 60 steps
• Content briefing and ordering is 65 steps 
• Content writing and editing is 75 steps
• Graphic design is 13 steps 
• Blog building and layout is 65 steps
• QA and publishing is 31 steps

SEMRush automates a lot of the hard work. But it’s still hard to maintain a high-quality, standardized process across all of these people, tools, and steps. 

Tango is an essential part of the modern SEO tech stack 💯

You can’t scale an SEO process, especially one involving freelancers, without detailed documentation. I used to hate making training guides. 

❌ A single training guide can take a full day

❌ Capturing and annotating screenshots is tedious work  

❌ They go out of date in months, sometimes weeks

With Tango, I complete all three of the following steps in a few minutes: 

1️⃣ I turn on Tango and walk through my step-by-step process. Tango captures my clicks and the handy Sidekick shows the screenshots as I go so I know if I need to add or remove anything. 

2️⃣ When I’m done, Tango instantly generates a beautiful how-to guide with screenshots, labels, and descriptions. If I need to, I use the blur feature to redact sensitive information or the editor to add extra annotations to some of the screenshots. 

3️⃣ When I’m ready to share, there are a few different options I use. For our internal team, I embed the Tangos in our Confluence knowledge base. Confluence has a table of contents feature that creates anchor links so readers can jump to any step in the process when they’re stuck. I made a Tango to show you how to do it. For our freelancers, I email them the dedicated Tango link.

Time saved with Tango 💃🏻

I was literally in shock the first time I used Tango. I finished this training guide in 30 minutes that would have taken me 8-10 hours before. 🤯 And the Tango is better than anything we had before.

These differences make a difference:
✅ With all of the time I’m saving on SEO training guides, I’m able to document more aspects of our process, update the processes more often, and spend more time on other areas that drive revenue for LinearB—like website conversion optimization! 

✅ Our team loves training guides with more screenshots and less text. They report clicking through processes faster because each step is clearer and they have less to read. 

✅ The zoom-in effect and little orange boxes make a big difference for clarity. Without them, the reader has to use extra mental energy to look for the relevant information. In theory, I could have added the annotations myself, but it takes so much time that I never did. 

The best part: Tangos are living documents 🌲

My favorite thing about Tangos is how easy they are to update. Before Tango, changes to our processes would pile up like a stack of bills I didn’t want to pay. Now I can update one or two steps in a minute without throwing away the whole training guide. That means our processes are always up to date, and I don’t have some big looming documentation project hanging over my head at all times. I love this part so much I made a video about it. 😁